Ok, but how about using vacuum caps as experimental controls to support your results? Wouldn't the difference between performance of the two dialectrics give insight into the process, and help sway skeptics (provided the results are as predicted, of course)?

Ok, but how about using vacuum caps as experimental controls to support your results? Wouldn't the difference between performance of the two dialectrics give insight into the process, and help sway skeptics (provided the results are as predicted, of course)?

2.71

Yes, it's possible to use the vacuum caps as controls for high-k caps for M-E drives, provided the vacuum cap has a similar form factor to the high-k cap, so the MLT's B-field flux through each would be close to the same. However, for MLTs, the Lorentz force is proportional to the ionic velocity of the dielectric's ions in the dielectric crossed with the applied B-field, but in a vacuum cap there are no ions to accelerated in a GRT world at least, so whether the crossed B-field would affect the E- and B-fields in the same vxB manner is an unknown to me at the moment. One way to avoid this issue would be to run these vacuum caps and the high-k dielectric caps in a rotary M-E drive that doesn't rely on the vxB Lorentz force for its bulk acceleration.

Ok, but how about using vacuum caps as experimental controls to support your results? Wouldn't the difference between performance of the two dialectrics give insight into the process, and help sway skeptics (provided the results are as predicted, of course)?

2.71

the problem with this is, how do you set a vacuum capacitor equal to a dielectric capacitor as a control? There's basically nothing common between a vacuum capacitor and a dialectric, they would require entirely different setups...hmm...It's a puzzler...

"If I'm not mistaken, the device needs to operate on the atoms in the dielectric in order to oscillate their mass. If there isn't a dielectric, there's nothing to oscillate."

That is correct per Woodward. If the mass or vacuum density fluctuations are actually occuring in the space and E-& B-fields around the ions though, then a vacuum dielectric may work, (See Sonny White's STAIF-2007 presentation posted in this forum.). However, to see measurable forces in a 2-meter ballistics pendulum, it takes running the cap cavity at ~2.45 GHz with ac peak voltages measured in the thousands of volts. Such an experiment is in the works by White.

I'm curious though. Anyone familliar with semiconductor electronics knows that some types of transistors dont move ions or electrons around so much as 'holes' in the semi conductor matrix.

It should actually be much easier to vary the mass of electrons than of ionized atoms, because the charge acting on the electron will vary its velocity proportionate to the charge. Thus you should be able to establish an electromagnetically asymmetric electron centrifuge chamber where the electrons vary speed from high on one side of the centrifuge orbit to slow on the opposite so that the electrons move in and out of a relativistic velocity range, thus varying their masses according to general relativity from one side to the other. This will produce a thrust vector in the direction adjacent to the side where the electrons are higher mass due to higher relativistic velocity.

May I point out that the ME thruster itself doesn't have to be in vacuum? It could be in a sealed container at 1 atm, placed in a vacuum chamber.

If there are any dielectric or other advantages to higher pressure or non-air atmosphere, that could be explored too.

If a self-contained, battery-powered M-E drive is rigidly attached into a hermetically sealed Faraday shield can where no accelerated gases or ions can escape it, and there are no power or control leads going into or out of the Faraday shield that could ionize the ambient air around them or the can, save an optical window in the can where optical control and data signals can be passed, there should by definition be no possibility of extraneous thrust signatures being generated from ion wind or any other mundane Newtonian source other than the pico-Newton forces generated by the optical control signals themselves. We can say this because the net regular mass flow rate crossing the Faraday shield boundary is ZERO. If there is NO normal delta mass flow rate going across this system boundary, no thrust can be produced per conservation of momentum. And since my thrust measurement system only has a resolution of tens of micro-Newtons, I don't care about extraneous pico-Newton grade control signals. Given these constraints, why do I need a vacuum system again?

Magnetic effects. You might want to have a magnetic shield around the assembly. Not that this would change if you had a vacuum chamber, although a steel vacuum chamber might do on its own...

Best solution is to get the thrust up to the point where none of the mundane explanations make any sense.

Mitigating differential heating of the hermetically sealed Faraday Shield can M-E test article would be taken care of by the use of a copper heat spreader in the can and locating the high heat sources in the center of the can. Mounting the can on its side for a test and then vertically would also add another control for this issue.

Minimizing magnetic interactions with outside magnetic sources or ferromagnetic materials are taken care of by using a steel Faraday Can with a magnetic permeability of at least 200. If needed, a secondary layer of mu-metal (mu=10,000 or higher) can be mounted inside the can. That is how I built the Mach-2MHz MLT by using a steel MinWax polish can sans the mu-metal layer and of course the MinWax polish.

Agreed, the best solution is to maximize the thrust output above 10.0 milli-Newton and preferably 0.1 Newton or higher. If I can get to that thrust level with all the noted controls in place, for me that's going to be as good as it gets unless someone is willing to donate the use of their <1x10^-6 Torr vacuum chamber for a few data runs. Being a self-contained unit should make this vacuum test relatively straight forward except for thermal issues. Iíd also be willing to run this self-contained M-E drive unit on my sonís air hockey table with videos of same, though for the first go around, it will only be a one axis thruster.

Ok, but how about using vacuum caps as experimental controls to support your results? Wouldn't the difference between performance of the two dialectrics give insight into the process, and help sway skeptics (provided the results are as predicted, of course)?

2.71

Yes, it's possible to use the vacuum caps as controls for high-k caps for M-E drives, provided the vacuum cap has a similar form factor to the high-k cap, so the MLT's B-field flux through each would be close to the same. However, for MLTs, the Lorentz force is proportional to the ionic velocity of the dielectric's ions in the dielectric crossed with the applied B-field, but in a vacuum cap there are no ions to accelerated in a GRT world at least, so whether the crossed B-field would affect the E- and B-fields in the same vxB manner is an unknown to me at the moment. One way to avoid this issue would be to run these vacuum caps and the high-k dielectric caps in a rotary M-E drive that doesn't rely on the vxB Lorentz force for its bulk acceleration.

Thanks. What I was getting at was that if you run the same experimental setup two times (once with the vacuum cap and once with a ceramic cap) and the thrust was measurable with ceramic but NOT with vacuum, then that goes at least part of the way to refuting claims that the thrust originates from non-capacitor related phenomena.

Of course, vacuum caps are relatively large, which would require designing around them. So this is possibly not feasible.

But if this can be easily crowbar-ed into an existing test article, do you think that it could help?

I just had another odd notion along the same line: instead of normal capacitor at vacuum or with dielectric, what if you used a gas-filled canister (like a gamma flux detector) as the load? The gas wouldn't provide a lot of mass for the fluctuation but with a noble gas at the right voltage and pressure, you would get a rapid ionization, cascade as it discharges, then a quench, over each cycle.

Add to that charge effect a gas mass-oscillation as the positively charged gas ions rush the anode, which since it is A/C is switching each half-cycle. So maybe no piezo needed?

Anyway, not sure if this would work as described but worth thinking about?

I have an idea for y'all. How much power does a reasonable thruster need. How about a small payload with solar cells to run a test unit on orbit for a while. This should make it easy to measure any thrust.

Also, if the current thrust level is so low it is hard to even measure, you are a long long way from making a practical thruster.

But good luck. I hope y'all are right. Going after a measurement is the right idea. Can I have a portion of the Nobel Prize in Physic when you can provide a repeatable measurement?

Trouble is, electrons don't mass a lot and you won't get a lot of thrust...

Well that depends on how many electrons you are handling plus the mass differential between high speed and low speed sides. If the solid capacitors dielectric atoms can only be varied in mass by 0.001%, and you can instead move 1000 electrons with a mass variance of 50% as they go from .1 c to .999 c from one side of the chamber to the other, and an electron is 0.0005 AMU at rest (thus becoming 0.001 AMU at .999c) then 1000 electrons exhibit a mass variance of 1 AMU per cycle.

Because you can move electrons much faster than ions, then you should be able to achieve MUCH higher cycle frequencies with the electrons in the chamber than you could with ions in a dielectric. As the charts that Paul has posted here indicate, higher the frequency, the higher the efficiency and higher the thrust.

I have an idea for y'all. How much power does a reasonable thruster need. How about a small payload with solar cells to run a test unit on orbit for a while. This should make it easy to measure any thrust.

Also, if the current thrust level is so low it is hard to even measure, you are a long long way from making a practical thruster.

But good luck. I hope y'all are right. Going after a measurement is the right idea. Can I have a portion of the Nobel Prize in Physic when you can provide a repeatable measurement?

Danny Deger

"I have an idea for y'all. How much power does a reasonable thruster need. How about a small payload with solar cells to run a test unit on orbit for a while. This should make it easy to measure any thrust."

That would be great! However who is going to pay for this little space junket? Even assuming the Falcon-1X is still only asking $10 million for a flight, that is so far out of our league as to be obscene. And even a suborbital flight on say Spaceship-2 that provides only ~5 minutes of zero gee time runs over $200K per seat and considering it would take two seats with one for the operator and one for the experiment, we are talking close to $1/2 million dollars for that very precious five minutes. No, I think I'll stick to air hockey tables when the time is right.

As to measuring small thrust levels, my Mach-2MHz had a maximum thrust of close to 5.0 milli-Newton, which is more than good enough to demonstrate the effect if people could be persuaded that all other mundane error sources had been removed from it. I can now see there is some legitimate complaints about how I performed that experiment, so I'll try it again, but this time doubling the number of caps and build it into a self contained, hermetically sealed and battery powered test article and see how that fairs.

Nobel prize? If anyone deserves that honor itís Jim Woodward, but Iím not holding my breath on that score either considering how Einstein was treated. (His Nobel Prize was for the photoelectric effect and NOT his relativity papers be they special or general.

Trouble is, electrons don't mass a lot and you won't get a lot of thrust...

Well that depends on how many electrons you are handling plus the mass differential between high speed and low speed sides. If the solid capacitors dielectric atoms can only be varied in mass by 0.001%, and you can instead move 1000 electrons with a mass variance of 50% as they go from .1 c to .999 c from one side of the chamber to the other, and an electron is 0.0005 AMU at rest (thus becoming 0.001 AMU at .999c) then 1000 electrons exhibit a mass variance of 1 AMU per cycle.

Because you can move electrons much faster than ions, then you should be able to achieve MUCH higher cycle frequencies with the electrons in the chamber than you could with ions in a dielectric. As the charts that Paul has posted here indicate, higher the frequency, the higher the efficiency and higher the thrust.

Mike:

What would you suggest building? Since we are dealing with electrons, I assume we would have to use some type of vacuum tube arrangement with a hot cathode emitter and then some type of capacitor arrangement for the energy storage element where the electrons would accumulate during each half cycle. We would then apply an external B-field to create the Lorentz force rectification signal. Past that Iím not seeing it yet, nor all the pitfalls along the way either.

Trouble is, electrons don't mass a lot and you won't get a lot of thrust...

Well that depends on how many electrons you are handling plus the mass differential between high speed and low speed sides. If the solid capacitors dielectric atoms can only be varied in mass by 0.001%, and you can instead move 1000 electrons with a mass variance of 50% as they go from .1 c to .999 c from one side of the chamber to the other, and an electron is 0.0005 AMU at rest (thus becoming 0.001 AMU at .999c) then 1000 electrons exhibit a mass variance of 1 AMU per cycle.

Because you can move electrons much faster than ions, then you should be able to achieve MUCH higher cycle frequencies with the electrons in the chamber than you could with ions in a dielectric. As the charts that Paul has posted here indicate, higher the frequency, the higher the efficiency and higher the thrust.

Mike:

What would you suggest building? Since we are dealing with electrons, I assume we would have to use some type of vacuum tube arrangement with a hot cathode emitter and then some type of capacitor arrangement for the energy storage element where the electrons would accumulate during each half cycle. We would then apply an external B-field to create the Lorentz force rectification signal. Past that Iím not seeing it yet, nor all the pitfalls along the way either.

Trouble is, electrons don't mass a lot and you won't get a lot of thrust...

Well that depends on how many electrons you are handling plus the mass differential between high speed and low speed sides. If the solid capacitors dielectric atoms can only be varied in mass by 0.001%, and you can instead move 1000 electrons with a mass variance of 50% as they go from .1 c to .999 c from one side of the chamber to the other, and an electron is 0.0005 AMU at rest (thus becoming 0.001 AMU at .999c) then 1000 electrons exhibit a mass variance of 1 AMU per cycle.

Because you can move electrons much faster than ions, then you should be able to achieve MUCH higher cycle frequencies with the electrons in the chamber than you could with ions in a dielectric. As the charts that Paul has posted here indicate, higher the frequency, the higher the efficiency and higher the thrust.

Mike:

What would you suggest building? Since we are dealing with electrons, I assume we would have to use some type of vacuum tube arrangement with a hot cathode emitter and then some type of capacitor arrangement for the energy storage element where the electrons would accumulate during each half cycle. We would then apply an external B-field to create the Lorentz force rectification signal. Past that Iím not seeing it yet, nor all the pitfalls along the way either.

Well I'm not quite sure what to build to make this work. Perhaps a donut coil but which has a cross section that is egg shaped that is either toed in or outward. This would be the core of a special sort of Betatron that would cause the electrons to orbit the donut in a odd orbit that would cause them to drop a lot of angular momentum on one side. Possible side effects are a significant amount of synchrotron radiation as "waste heat" of the energy conversion.

Trouble is, electrons don't mass a lot and you won't get a lot of thrust...

Well that depends on how many electrons you are handling plus the mass differential between high speed and low speed sides. If the solid capacitors dielectric atoms can only be varied in mass by 0.001%, and you can instead move 1000 electrons with a mass variance of 50% as they go from .1 c to .999 c from one side of the chamber to the other, and an electron is 0.0005 AMU at rest (thus becoming 0.001 AMU at .999c) then 1000 electrons exhibit a mass variance of 1 AMU per cycle.

Because you can move electrons much faster than ions, then you should be able to achieve MUCH higher cycle frequencies with the electrons in the chamber than you could with ions in a dielectric. As the charts that Paul has posted here indicate, higher the frequency, the higher the efficiency and higher the thrust.

Mike:

What would you suggest building? Since we are dealing with electrons, I assume we would have to use some type of vacuum tube arrangement with a hot cathode emitter and then some type of capacitor arrangement for the energy storage element where the electrons would accumulate during each half cycle. We would then apply an external B-field to create the Lorentz force rectification signal. Past that Iím not seeing it yet, nor all the pitfalls along the way either.

Be careful. You might accidently end up with a Polywell Fusor.

kkattula:

I know you say that in jest, but what if we could actually turn Bussard's Wiffle Ball (WB) fusion reactor into an M-E drive? (Visions of Star Trek NTG's pulsating antimatter reactor core down in engineering being tended by Jordy comes to mind )

Seriously, using a WB-XX reactor as our starting point, we have the required energy source that we could then modulate its output (d^2E/dt^2) by applying a time varying E-field to the already existing 100kV E-field potential well used to retard and covert the kinetic energy of the escaping fusion helium ions into electrical potential energy for the ship. If we then bulk accelerated the fusion core plasma and these escaping helium ions at the appropriate MLTís 2X the E-field rate by differentially modulating the existing B-field virtual grid coils in a particular direction, we could have one hell of a dual use technology with full 360 degree thrust vectoring in the X, Y, and Z axes!!

Trouble is, electrons don't mass a lot and you won't get a lot of thrust...

Well that depends on how many electrons you are handling plus the mass differential between high speed and low speed sides. If the solid capacitors dielectric atoms can only be varied in mass by 0.001%, and you can instead move 1000 electrons with a mass variance of 50% as they go from .1 c to .999 c from one side of the chamber to the other, and an electron is 0.0005 AMU at rest (thus becoming 0.001 AMU at .999c) then 1000 electrons exhibit a mass variance of 1 AMU per cycle.

Because you can move electrons much faster than ions, then you should be able to achieve MUCH higher cycle frequencies with the electrons in the chamber than you could with ions in a dielectric. As the charts that Paul has posted here indicate, higher the frequency, the higher the efficiency and higher the thrust.

Mike:

What would you suggest building? Since we are dealing with electrons, I assume we would have to use some type of vacuum tube arrangement with a hot cathode emitter and then some type of capacitor arrangement for the energy storage element where the electrons would accumulate during each half cycle. We would then apply an external B-field to create the Lorentz force rectification signal. Past that Iím not seeing it yet, nor all the pitfalls along the way either.

Well I'm not quite sure what to build to make this work. Perhaps a donut coil but which has a cross section that is egg shaped that is either toed in or outward. This would be the core of a special sort of Betatron that would cause the electrons to orbit the donut in a odd orbit that would cause them to drop a lot of angular momentum on one side. Possible side effects are a significant amount of synchrotron radiation as "waste heat" of the energy conversion.

Mike:

See my above post to kkattula. Using much more massive He ions for our basic M-E element would be preferable to using electrons, especially with the kinetic energy these He ions have with this dual use circumstances. And it doesn't cost us anything to accelerate them!

Trouble is, electrons don't mass a lot and you won't get a lot of thrust...

Well that depends on how many electrons you are handling plus the mass differential between high speed and low speed sides. If the solid capacitors dielectric atoms can only be varied in mass by 0.001%, and you can instead move 1000 electrons with a mass variance of 50% as they go from .1 c to .999 c from one side of the chamber to the other, and an electron is 0.0005 AMU at rest (thus becoming 0.001 AMU at .999c) then 1000 electrons exhibit a mass variance of 1 AMU per cycle.

Because you can move electrons much faster than ions, then you should be able to achieve MUCH higher cycle frequencies with the electrons in the chamber than you could with ions in a dielectric. As the charts that Paul has posted here indicate, higher the frequency, the higher the efficiency and higher the thrust.

Mike:

What would you suggest building? Since we are dealing with electrons, I assume we would have to use some type of vacuum tube arrangement with a hot cathode emitter and then some type of capacitor arrangement for the energy storage element where the electrons would accumulate during each half cycle. We would then apply an external B-field to create the Lorentz force rectification signal. Past that Iím not seeing it yet, nor all the pitfalls along the way either.

Be careful. You might accidently end up with a Polywell Fusor.

kkattula:

I know you say that in jest, but what if we could actually turn Bussard's Wiffle Ball (WB) fusion reactor into an M-E drive? (Visions of Star Trek NTG's pulsating antimatter reactor core down in engineering being tended by Jordy comes to mind )

Seriously, using a WB-XX reactor as our starting point, we have the required energy source that we could then modulate its output (d^2E/dt^2) by applying a time varying E-field to the already existing 100kV E-field potential well used to retard and covert the kinetic energy of the escaping fusion helium ions into electrical potential energy for the ship. If we then bulk accelerated the fusion core plasma and these escaping helium ions at the appropriate MLTís 2X the E-field rate by differentially modulating the existing B-field virtual grid coils in a particular direction, we could have one hell of a dual use technology with full 360 degree thrust vectoring in the X, Y, and Z axes!!

Interesting. As long as the B-field modulation didn't interfere with the fusor operation.

I'd be a little worried about the electrons (that form the virtual grid) being accelerated into the coil housings, since they're such low mass compared to the ions, but have the same magnitude charge. Or would the period of the acceleration be too small to have that effect?